Back when President Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration rolled around, his personal finances were not looking good. The state of New York had declared him a fraud, and fined him $364 million dollars, and the interest was compounding by the minute. There was even talk of Trump Tower getting seized and turned into the Letitia James Center For Kicking Trump Hard In The Nuts!

But what a difference 10 months makes. The president and his family have now made more than $4.5 BILLION dollars since January, thanks to shilling their branded crypto products on an online trading platform called PancakeSwap, administered by the exchange platform Binance.

And what do you know, Trump has just pardoned Binance’s majority owner and founder, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao!

Zhao had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, for not complying with US anti-money-laundering transaction-reporting requirements. Binance’s safeguards were so lax that countries under sanctions and terrorist groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State were able to move money on the platform.

. . . But then Trump got elected, and Zhao hired lobbyist Ches McDowell, a 35-year-old from North Carolina who’d never worked for Congress, the White House, or any other Washington institution. But in 2016 he won an auction to go on a bear hunt with Don Junior, and the two have been friends ever since!

And LOL, the elder Trump got real flustered when Kaitlin Collins asked him about Zhao’s pardon. Trump has no idea who that guy is! Something something Biden autopen.